There’s a fantastic story on TechRadar today about “The Secret behind Threadless’ Success“. Like many other Web 2.0 success stories, the whole thing started as a hobby and almost accidently turned into a thriving business – with crowdsourcing shifting from something they were “unknowingly” doing to the center of their entire strategy. As co-founder Jake explained while taking a break from selling 100,000 shirts a month:
“We learned that what we were doing was called crowdsourcing about three years into the project,” Jake chuckles, “and ended up being the prime example for it. We just started Threadless as a hobby, not to be a business. Not only did we not know the business model was crowdsourcing but we didn’t know there was a business model. Today it’s the core of our business. It affects every department: the way we market, the way we do our customer service.”
But what I found most interesting from this article was his perspective on advertising – or perhaps I should say distaste for it:
“We’ve experimented with advertising pretty recently and have had mostly negative reactions to it,” Jake explains. “It’s always been something that we’ve felt is not right for us. Me and Jeffrey [Kalmikoff, Threadless' chief creative officer] used to work at four ad agencies, so we have a pretty strong understanding of what advertising means and how evil it is.” He chuckles.
“With our company it’s all about trust and honesty and we just don’t like the idea of pushing our brand on people who otherwise wouldn’t hear about it. We like the idea of it spreading via word of mouth, organically, naturally. It’s not that we don’t market, we just don’t advertise. I’d rather somebody hears about Threadless through an article in a magazine than an advertisement in a magazine.”
It’s a perspective that seems to be fairly pervasive in this space – direct advertising is some mixture of evil, inauthentic, and a waste of time. But as he notes, it’s not like they don’t market – they just don’t advertise. In other words, they like to tell their story in a genuine way, and hope the community helps them share the message – which they’ve been doing in spades. And the beauty of that model – if you have a compelling story to tell – can be mostly clearly seen when the direct marcom budget line is trending towards zero…
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